Matthew Hicks

A group of registrars suing to block a controversial service for the back-ordering of domain names has dropped its lawsuit, but the service remains mired in legal disputes. Eight registrars last year sued VeriSign Inc. and the domain name systems main oversight body, the ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), to stop the […]

Mozilla Firefox is gaining more search-engine supporters as Yahoo Inc. launches a version of its toolbar for the open-source Web browser. Starting Thursday, Yahoo will make a beta a version of its Firefox toolbar available as a free download. It will include many of the same features as the Yahoo Toolbar for Microsofts Internet Explorer […]

Vonage and AT&T have settled a naming dispute related to AT&Ts voice-over-IP services. Broadband telephony startup Vonage Holdings Corp. had filed a trademark-infringement lawsuit against AT&T in March, alleging that the name of AT&Ts newly launched VOIP service is confusingly similar to its own company and product name. The companies have settled the lawsuit out […]

Google executives attempted to demystify the search companys product decisions during presentations with Wall Street analysts on Wednesday. As Google Inc. has moved beyond Web search and into product areas as diverse as e-mail, photo-organizing software and mapping tools, one of the common questions for the company is how it decides where to devote resources. […]

America Online has opened a larger public beta of an AOL-branded Web browser that is based on Microsofts Internet Explorer. The AOL Browser beta, which started in October with a select group of AOL subscribers, is now open to AOL members as well as to the 36 million active users of AOL Instant Messenger, an […]

Microsofts MSN division has restored access to MSN Messenger after a large portion of its users faced problems accessing the instant-messaging service over the past 24 hours. The outage, which began Monday evening and affected a “significant” number of MSN Messenger users, was fixed by about 5 p.m. PST on Tuesday, an MSN spokeswoman confirmed. […]

In another expansion of its online services, Google Inc. Tuesday launched a mapping feature that combines local search results with maps and driving directions. The Mountain View, Calif., company introduced Google Maps as an experimental service through its Google Labs site. While the service provides traditional mapping features such as the ability to zoom in […]

Socialtext Inc. is building deeper ties between wikis and the enterprise in the latest release of its Internet content publishing service. Socialtext Workspace 1.5, which was launched Monday, integrates the wiki service with enterprise directories based on LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) and Microsoft Active Directory. Socialtext Workspace is generally sold as a hosted service, […]

A collaboration tool launched on Monday is designed to ease the distribution of large files for enterprises. Ignite Technologies Inc. of Dallas introduced its Ignite Communicator service, which aims to deliver any type of digital content such as video, graphical presentations and software to users regardless of their networking or computer capacity. Ignite Communicator, for […]

As Google and Yahoo dive into indexing television programs and video, a San Francisco-based startup company is taking a different approach to searching for multimedia content as it prepares to expand. GoFish Technologies Inc. has created an index of 14 million downloadable digital media files that range from audio and video to games and mobile […]